Video Games and Challenge

When was the last time you truly felt challenged by a game?  Games used to give you a limited number of lives to finish with and if you couldn’t, tough.  Of course, this stemmed from the coin-op arcade tradition, where the intention was to make you use more and more quarters.   Today, however, pretty much any game you can power through if you’re determined enough and/or set the difficulty low enough.  Can’t remember a game in the modern console age where anyone said it was too tough to finish (a common complain in the first and second gen game systems).

One of my favorite games growing up was a game called Elite.  In an age where games were mostly side scrollers or top-down view and pretty much consisted of killing everything in sight, this game was a revelation, and a means to indulge in a childhood dream even when I was still a child.

The premise is simple – you’re given a space ship and some money, dropped in the middle of the universe and told “have fun.”  After that you’re on your own.  You can trade goods from planet to planet, be a pirate raiding transports, a bounty hunter raiding pirates, a miner hunting asteroids, it’s all up to you to make your way in the universe as you see fit.  For me as a kid, it was like being given my own Millenium Falcon.

As you can see the graphics weren’t much. This is your ship coming to dock at a rotating space station.

Jump to the present day, where attempts to recapture this glory have come and gone.  The closest, to my mind, is a game called X3, the most recent in a series of space/trade/fight/whatever sims.

The graphics have improved.  This is your ship docked at a space station (watching another ship on a secondary monitor attacking said space station).

In a way a standard element of all video games takes away from this experience.  The game itself is actually quite slow, it’s not a shootem up per se (unless you manage to earn enough for much better ships).  Combat is serious, and deadly.

But who cares if you can just load a previous save if you die?  There’s nothing stopping you from taking every crazy risk you come across and if you die, reload from the last time you docked at a station.  The sense of danger and tension are greatly reduced because there’s very little in the way of consequences if you screw up.

Then X3 introduced a “dead is dead” mode.

Dead is Dead is exactly what it says.  You can’t make multiple saves, the game automatically saves every time you quit and that’s it.  However, part of the save is stored online (so you need an active internet connection to load your game).  If you ever die in the game, the game is erased.  No do-overs.

That means you could spend days trading from station to station, trying to earn enough credits for a new ship, when you got a bit lazy and didn’t pay close enough attention to that pirate you thought was just passing by on the way to something else.  Next thing you know you’re spacedust and if you want to play again, it’s from the beginning.

Now, this could easily be considered a frustrating feature, but to me it’s what I’ve always wanted.  Yes, I’ve died a number of times getting used to this new way of thinking.  Sometimes by pirates or other enemies, though once my autopilot crashed me into a freighter (my own fault in a way, I cranked the engines too high for it to respond in a timely fashion).  But I’ll tell you this – it quickly taught me the difference between the way I play games normally, and how I play when everything is on the line.  I no longer engage in active combat at all, not in the crappy ship I have.  It’ll take a long time before I find a better ship and upgrade it to the point where I’d feel comfortable engaging anything more aggressive than a cargo container.

Which is as it should be.  It makes the experience more real, and when forced into a hostile situation, the tension you feel is also real.  My neck muscles tightened as I desperately tried to dock at a space station before a pursuing hostile fighter could reach my unarmed ship.  I waited hours for it to go away, but it kept on lurking outside the station.  I’d leave the game running to do other things until it gave up, but it never did.  In the end I waited until it patrolled far enough away that I could make a run for the nearest jumpgate, and hope it wouldn’t pursue me.  It didn’t.  And that felt like a victory greater than taking on a dozen fighters in a dogfight.

It’s not a game mode that’s for everyone, but for me and for this kind of game, it’s perfect.

Now that I’ve had enough practice getting used to all the controls again (and being thoroughly aware of my own mortality), it’s time to take this seriously, and see how I can stack up to Han Solo.